Religious Cult to Workplace Culture Expert: Peter Greedy’s Journey Into Truth

In this episode, Fran sits down with Peter Greedy, an optometrist-turned-coach whose life took an extraordinary turn when he became part of the UK religious group Antioch in 1983.

Peter spent 15 years inside its tightly controlled world, communal living, patriarchal teachings, no-dating rules, love-bombing, and an intense culture of obedience. He shares how he was first drawn in as a young man newly arrived in London, how members were recruited, and how allegations and internal handling of abuse shaped the community from within.

A major organisational split in 1998 finally pushed Peter and his family out, leaving him to face the truth of what he’d been part of and who he was without it.

But this isn’t just a story about leaving a cult.
 It’s about the patterns that follow us into the workplace.

Now a researcher and PhD student in coaching psychology, Peter reveals the striking similarities between high-control religious groups and the way some leaders run teams, companies, and even sports organisations. He shares insights from his Workplace Culture Index, showing how culture is built (or broken) by behaviour, not branding.

Together, we explore:
 • How coercive dynamics show up in everyday organisations
 • The power of emotional intelligence and psychological safety
 • Why questioning, critical thinking and connection are cultural lifelines
 • What recovering from a high-control system really looks like
 • How leaders can build cultures rooted in trust, belonging and humanity

This is a conversation about truth, autonomy, and the courage it takes to see what’s really going on — whether you’re in a church, a company, or a community.

A powerful, eye-opening episode. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

About Peter

I am passionate about and specialise in personal development, building high performing teams, 
enabling great leadership and optimising workplace culture. 
This is borne of significant lived experiences - being a religious cult member for 15 years (1983-1998), working in a corporate environment for 12 years, and an extensive career in primary 
healthcare meeting people from every walk of life. 
My career in optometry has spanned 40 years having entered City University Optometry School 
in 1984. Most of this time has been spent, either full time or part time, in primary healthcare. 
From 1996 to 2008 I worked for the global healthcare corporation, with roles in professional 
services, training, and IT. Since 2008 I have worked part time as a locum optometrist for a 
variety of practices, from high end independents to national chains. 
I am founder of Coaches and Mentors in Optics (CaMiO) a peer group collective of colleagues in 
the optical industry who provide coaching, mentoring and wellbeing services. 
I hold the following coaching accreditations: Accredited Professional Coach with the 
Association for Coaching, Integrative Coach, Ikigai Life Coach, Resilience Coach, and Belbin 
Team Roles Practitioner. I am currently studying for a PhD in Coaching Psychology. 
In my spare time I am an active member of the Events and CPD team for Gloucestershire Local 
Optical Committee. Otherwise, I am usually found at my home desk or out hiking somewhere. 

http://petergreedy.com/ 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/petergreedy/

If you have a story that you think would be good for the podcast, please do get in touch by emailing thepowerofthetruth@mojo-motivator.com. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:06

Hi, and welcome to the Power of the Truth podcast with me, Fran Willoughby. Today I'm going to be interviewing Peter Greedy. Peter was part of a religious cult in the UK from a young age when he moved to London from South Wales. And he talks with real openness and honesty about his experiences in that cult, meeting his wife, having children, and then once leaving the cult, how that shaped who he is today and how he approaches situations and supports other people leaving similar toxic cultures and communities. Thank you so much for listening. If you enjoy the episode, please do subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Follow the power of the truth on social media and leave comments and interact as much as you can, and it helps us be seen by other people. I'd be so grateful. Thank you so much. But without further ado, let's get into it. So here is my conversation with Peter Greedy. Welcome to the podcast, Peter. Thank you so much for being here.

SPEAKER_02 1:11

My pleasure.

SPEAKER_00 1:13

So, for the people that don't know who you are, would you mind just giving us a little overview about your background and how you've ended up being on the podcast with me today?

SPEAKER_02 1:23

Yeah, sure. So Peter Greedy's potted history, perhaps. Born and raised in Newport, son of a vicar, so very much involved in the church. Left Newport in South Wales, age 19, to go to London to university. Um, started in dental school and for various reasons, which we might come on to because of things I got involved with, actually bombed out of dental school after the first year, uh, transferred to optometry school, and then graduated and became an optometrist, which has been my career for the last 40 odd years. Then in COVID, I then became a coach out of various reasons. I had no work for about four months. Uh, several people suggested Pete, you should be a coach. And I thought, okay. Being in a regulated healthcare professional, um, I thought actually I will align myself with a professional body, uh, and I've done various qualifications and now I'm a professionally credentialed coach with the Association for Coaching. So I'm a member of the College of Optometrists, I'm a member of the Association for Coaching. And then parallel to that, at the age of 19, when I went to London, um, very first week, I joined an organization, uh, a religious organization, became a member, was in that for 15 years. Um, it's where I met my wife, had my young family, uh, left that organization, and about a decade after leaving, I kind of went, oh crap, I was in a cult. And now my wife and I support people who are coming out of that cult and other cults, it's a big global cult. Most people have heard of uh The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood's book. That was based on her time visiting one of the branches of the cult I was in. So my wife would have been called a handmaid from the handmaid's tale as part of that. So obviously, that's a fictionalized, fantastical version of it, but there's a lot of terminology used by Margaret Atwood that handmaid being one of them that came directly from uh the cult that I was in. And so I've been on this big journey of being a really radical Christian. I've gone through this huge kind of deconstruction. We can talk a bit about the effect of cults and what it's like to be in a cult and how coercion and mind control play out, but essentially you end up with a very, very, very narrow worldview. You're just fed all the answers, we're right, everyone else is wrong. So to deconstruct that is a massive task because you have to really open up your worldview from like super narrow one degree up to a hundred and eighty kind of wide angle view. I took in loads and loads of stuff, processed it, deconstructed, reflected, and then have reconstructed my own worldview, my value system, etc. Now I would call myself an atheist. However, I also would say I am a spiritual person, in that for me, spirituality is just the way I describe it, simply is a connection to something way bigger than myself, whether that's the universe, nature, people, um, it can be anything. So uh I'm very open to that. I kind of have a sciencey logical brain, which also means that now, having come out of an environment where I was fed all the answers, now I'm massively curious. And instead of claiming to have all the answers, I've got all the questions, and I love to ask questions and be curious and discover stuff, even with people I completely disagree with. So, yeah, there you go. That gives you a bit of an overview of who I am and how I got to where I am now.

SPEAKER_00 5:22

Amazing, thank you very much. Yeah, uh, there's a lot to unpack there. So, just to take you back to being 19, you know, I I was there myself, I moved to London from Yorkshire when I was 18. You know, the streets are paved with gold. We moved to the big city, it's all very exciting. Obviously, coming from a religious family, you said your dad was a vicar. So, what in that first week, what made you join the the cult? Or you not that you knew it was a cult then, but that religious organization? Were they just recruiting around campus?

SPEAKER_02 5:54

Yeah, so that was very simple, in fact, because uh actually a good friend of mine was an academic year older than me, he'd been recruited, and that's the term we use by the cult the year before. I happened to be in halls of residence, literally about 400 metres from his halls of residence. Uh, I thought, okay, you know, actually, I've always been involved in the church. I'm new in London, place to meet new people apart from the halls of residence and my college. It was like, well, maybe I'll join something like a Christian union or something like that. And my mate Richard was like, Oh, Pete, just I've got involved in this, it's a really fun group. And literally, I went along in the first week. And and back then, so this is 1983, which does date me a bit. I'm 61. It was run, it was run by a bunch of Americans, and back then in the 80s, I was somewhat mesmerized by America and the States, and you know, land of opportunity. And these guys were actually from the Midwest, they were proper, like cowboys, right? They, you know, they wore cowboy boots, one of them wore a Stetson hat, and they had these big belt buckles and all this sort of stuff, and they they were just fun to be around. They they do what they call love bombing, okay, which is a particular type of recruitment tactic where they just tell you you're great and they invite you to everything, to some meals, to some sports. We used to play Ultimate Frisbee at the weekend and and all this sort of stuff, and they just kind of you get absorbed and completely enveloped in these great things, and at the time it was really attractive. Like I said, I had no clue it was a cult. I just thought, hey, this is fun, this is nice, these are nice people, and I was completely sucked in, really, and it then just sort of iteratively slowly developed from there to be you know more and more sucked in, more and more radicalized, etc. But yeah, literally, in terms of the fact that first week, it was just like, oh, this is a cool place to go, these are fun people, let's get to know them. And actually, my future wife was there at that very first meeting serving the uh the orange squash and coffees for us. Amazing.

SPEAKER_00 8:06

And do you know what? I think how I grew up in the Church of England, Sunday school community, it's a perfectly rational, logical thought, I think, having grown up in that type of community, which is what the church was all about. I mean, back in the day before we had social media and smartphones, if someone didn't turn up to church on Sunday, that's how you knew whether they were all right or not, right? Like everybody just used to convene in one place. And if old Mrs. So-and-so didn't turn up, someone went and checked on her, right? So I think that's a perfectly logical decision to go, oh, do you know what? This'll be a nice place to meet people without really understanding potentially the the further implications of what you were joining. And I guess that's where how they get you, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01 8:49

Yeah, yeah, completely.

SPEAKER_00 8:52

So I know you said you met your wife. How did that develop? What did it look like? We you weren't living there, were you? Because obviously you were living in your halls of residence.

SPEAKER_02 9:04

So first year I was in halls of residence, and they did for people who might be familiar with what's called the Alpha Course, which was a course developed by I forget the guy's name, but he was one of the vicars at Holy Trinity Brompton, which was a big sort of evangelical thing. And the Alpha course is and you see posters and adverts for it all around the place. It's it's an introduction to Christianity. They basically they did a very similar course, and it was called Basic Christianity. So it was a 12-week course that you did throughout that first term. So you went along every week, and there were other activities around that, and it was their version of what becoming and being a Christian was like. And now it was what we call a charismatic organization, so they would lead you to the sort of climax of that 12-week program was getting what they call baptized in the Holy Spirit, and they believed in all the happy clappy stuff, that's kind of what it was, and I I have a different interpretation on that right now. Um, but it would be speaking tongues, prophetic gifts, they believed in healing and a whole bunch of stuff, which, as I say, I've got a different view from a neurological uh neurotransmitter kind of understanding now of how that worked emotionally and psychologically. Um, so that was the sort of first 12-week programme, and then they were very strong on lots of teaching. So the guy who founded the cult was very much an academic, not a typical cult leader, in that he wasn't a big charismatic personality, he was more the kind of guru type, you know, he was he's a quite introvert um chap, uh, who just wrote a lot, very clever, very academic, and he he basically wrote all these programs. So once you did this basic Christianity, you then got introduced to the next level of teaching and the next level of teaching, and it was more and more radical, very prescriptive, and very patriarchal, highly sexist, probably misogynistic in terms of men were head of the house, men were the leaders, etc. etc. So that was took up my first year, but actually, then immediately I was invited into a household, as they called it. So that my second year in London, I shared a three-bedroom flat with seven other guys. There were eight of us. So it was a massive, it was a big old uh I don't know what period my history's rubbish, but it was a huge house on Holland Road in West Kensington. We had the basement and the ground floor, so the two rooms on the ground floor were just big rooms which became bedrooms, and I'd shared a room with two other guys. They were single-sex households, so it was men only, so it was called a men's household. The downstairs two rooms, there was a kitchen, one of them was a uh a bedroom, uh, and then there was a kind of common room, and yeah, and then there, you know, it was really organized, really structured. So every morning we would do morning prayers together. Again, that would be in the charismatic style. So there'd be a cross on the wall, we'd stand, we'd face this cross. I played the guitar, I became one of the worship leaders in this cult. We would chant psalms and go through a little liturgy every morning, and then have breakfast, and then we'd all go off to college because we were all students. It was called it was the university branch, so it was called University Christian Outreach. It specifically targeted the university students, which was a smart move on their part because they're they're targeting clever people. I think a lot of people assume that people that get involved in cults are maybe a bit naive, not necessarily highly educated, um, uh, but that's so wrong, right? That's so not the case. You know, these were all smart people. And one of the guys I shared a room with, he became the leader of the London branch, actually, and most of the guys I knew there, because it was very male-dominated in terms of their recruitment, they've had extremely successful business careers, some of them easily multi-millionaires, very wealthy, very affluent. And of course, there's a tithing principle, so you give 10% of your income to the uh organization as well. So, you know, if financially you're tied in, etc. etc. So, yeah, that's kind of what it looked like. And I lived to strict uh obviously, or not obviously, but strict no-dating policy, right? Um, so girlfriends were taboo. Um, and actually, one of the things the guys who led this University Christian outreach, they were actually part of a celibate order, we called it the Brotherhood. So they'd made vows of celibacy, okay. Which, if I look now 40 years later, and stuff around you know, um, the the manosphere and incel and all that sort of stuff is quite an interesting perspective. But part of what we were taught back then in the 80s, it was like actually there was a strong encouragement to consider your what was called state of life. So you were encouraged to decide were you supposed to be celibate or were you called to be married, literally, and that was a discernment process that you were supposed to go through even before you thought about dating. And some of the people I knew, I I actually kind of tried it out. I lived in the brotherhood house for one year at one point, and you know, it's very basic, very Spartan. They slept on the floor, or if it if it was bunk beds, there were no mattresses, it was just a board, you know. It's it was it was very, very crude, basic. I mean, there was a commitment to a simple life, common possessions, and all that stuff in the brotherhood, not so much in the community. That clearly wasn't for me, but you know, it kind of gives you a flavour of how controlled, organised, you know, really prescriptive lifestyle that you had. I was always a little bit rebellious, if I'm perfectly honest. I think being a vicar's son back home in South Wales, I think psychologists might call it a pseudo-personality, um, where you kind of have this one way of living in a particular environment and a completely different way of being and living in a uh an alternative environment. And I developed that because you know, because of being raised in a churchy house, you know. So uh I knew exactly how to behave in front of my parents and around them. Walked out the door to go to school, then I'd be swearing and doing all sorts of stuff that you know my parents wouldn't approve of, and a whole bunch of stuff they don't know to this day, you know. Um and that kind of in some ways I would say gave me a tool to that slightly protected me when I actually was being recruited and sucked in more and more to this cult. I was cheeky sometimes when I'd go back home to see my parents after I was part of this organization, you know, I'd I'd cheekily phone up an ex-girlfriend and you know go and have a booty called a nice evening and a bit of you know, why not? A cheeky snog or whatever, you know. It was you know, all of those sorts of things. So so I kind of I had this sort of sense. So later on in life, when it was like this isn't quite right, coming out of it wasn't so difficult for me, nowhere near as difficult as it was for my wife, for example, who was much more fully indoctrinated into it.

SPEAKER_00 16:49

And was she she was born into it, was she?

SPEAKER_02 16:53

Not born into it, but no, her parents joined when she was about 13, 14.

SPEAKER_01 16:58

Right.

SPEAKER_02 16:58

So she was recruited into it as a teenager. So we were in this organization called University Christian Outreach. Parallel to that was like a community that was more of a family thing, right? So her parents were involved in that. At the time, it was called the West London Covenant Community, bit of a mouthful. It became later became known as Antioch. That was just its name. So she she'd been part of the youth program there, and one of these Brotherhood guys led the youth program, and actually turns out that he's had various accusations of uh pedophilia and rape, actually. Um so that's you know pretty horrendous and quite scarring. Thankfully, my wife was never uh directly abused by uh those people, but she would say she was spiritually abused, which again is more this kind of coercion and control around spiritual stuff, so yeah, and then it just so happened we're the same age, we're both 64 babies, we both went to university at the same time, so she was in another college, so it was a natural progression for her to go from the youth program into the university outreach program, which is how we then kind of met.

SPEAKER_00 18:16

And were there any red flags at all? Because obviously you're incredibly bright, you're you're a bright glow, you were highly intuitive, switched on, you've come from a nice family background. Was there anything in that first couple of years, even when to the point when you were then went and lived virtually like a monk when the brotherhood came, was there anything, you know, red flags where they or was it just that they were so clever about how they manipulated the truth essentially for you to believe that this is what you were meant to be?

SPEAKER_02 18:47

I think coming back to the points I was just chatting about, I think there was always something about me that that was never in it 100%. Yeah, I suppose. Which I I don't know why or how I that's just the way I was wired. So I've always been very uh able to let go of stuff, just give stuff up and move on to the next thing. I can comp out mentalise and stuff. So red flags, were there red flags? Uh there was stuff that I thought, you know, a bit weird, I suppose. And I just thought they're just really dedicated, you know. Uh and did I think everything they taught was right? No, I don't think I did. But you know, part of it I think at the time what kept us in or kept me in was just the relationships, really good friends. Now, actually, again, talking about letting go, I'm not friends with any of them now, and I've let that go. Even Richard, the guy who recruited me that I was friends with from South Wales, uh, he's in the Brotherhood, right? And he's still there, still there. My mother-in-law's still a member, right? In her late 80s, so we've got so many connections of some people who've left, uh, who are sort of more my kids' age. So I've got kids in their 30s, early 30s. Lots of that generation left, but a lot of the people of my peer group are still in there, their parents are still in there. Now we left because the community went through a split in '98. It was the global kind of organization went through a split. Two of the big characters had a bit of a disagreement, and there was a split. And the the branch of the community we were in, we kind of tried to maintain relationships with both sides. And then what happened is one side said, We're not happy that you're relating to us and still relating to the other side. You have to choose. So we were forced to choose. It went to a vote. Uh um, I mean, community size, we were about 150, maybe 200 people in that community, and I think there were about five families that said, Um, so the majority went with the the original group that came to us and said, You gotta choose. They went with that. There were about five families that said, No, that's not right for us, and we were one of those families. At the time, my wife was she was secretary to one of the leaders, so she was privy to some of the communications that had gone on, and she was, I think, quite protective to the to the guy who was the leader at the time, and he got lambasted by some people. He was one of the people that said, No, no, no, I'm not going that way, we're we're out of here, and we followed with that, and so that's how we ended up leaving um and moving on, and then we just joined a local church, and gradually I then drifted away from that. So, yeah, I think certainly at that time, by the time we got to the point where it was like, no, no, no, we're not staying with them. There were enough red flags, but in terms of particularly the abuse stuff, I mean that's only come out much, much later on. Where yeah, just a whole bunch. I I think the current count we reckon uh at our wedding, uh I think the current count is there's probably four men who are uh accused or on paedophile registers for different things. One was a Catholic priest, and others were in this brotherhood organization. The issues we've got is that uh there was no sense of accountability externally, it was all dealt with internally, and actually for us, part of the hideous thing is that things were reported about improper behaviour, and these guys they would simply then just shift to another community shipped off to another community, and then just did the same bloody stuff again, right? So eventually the stuff came to light, and more serious allegations were made, and uh and yes, there have been bat law cases, etc. So uh the more serious red flags came after we'd left, I'd suppose. And you're so sucked in to thinking, uh oh, this is this is good. These people have kind of got some structure here, uh and you're just convinced, you know, more and more. Like I say, I was lucky, I was protected in some ways because I I had this slightly sort of sense of open-mindedness um there, so it was really easy for me to leave it all behind and move on. Um, but I yeah, certainly when I reflect back, I think, oh my god, Pete, why didn't you see some of these red flags? Because they were there, you know. Um but really they're smart, smart people, they're clever, right? So they go right to the edge of things as well. The abuse in certain things is highly illegal, etc., and that's criminal and that's unacceptable. But so many things were very just you know, very radical. You just thought, okay, this is radical, which kind of can be appealing. No, it's prescriptive, it tells you how to live your life, it gives you guidelines, it gives you support. You had such strong support. The weekend was just busy, busy, busy. So we did a thing called the Lord's Day on a Saturday evening, which was a bit like if you're familiar with the Church of England, it's a bit like the Last Supper type thing, you know, you'd break bread, you'd pass a cup of wine around, so it wasn't considered communion. They added a little cheese plate, right? So you'd have a little piece of cheese with your bread. Um, but you know, it's really liturgical, so there was a proper ceremony about it, you know, and you do all this stuff, and you know, and that kind of was fun, and then when the meal was done, you'd all do the washing up together, someone would get out a guitar, you'd all sing along while you're doing the washing up. So a real sense of community, literally, you know, which which actually is is is for me is has been quite a difficult word to to repurpose because actually I thoroughly believe in community, right? Just not the community that I was in, you know.

SPEAKER_00 25:21

So what did your what did your parents think about it all when you used to go home? Did you were you honest with them about what it actually was and and everything that you were doing, or did you kind of shield them from it a little bit?

SPEAKER_02 25:33

Yeah, it's a really good question, actually, Fran, because um I've reflected on that a little bit since. And and actually there was one point where my dad got quite suspicious. So instead of protecting them from it, because I was okay with it, I invited them. So they they came, they visited, they weren't down with the happy clappy stuff, right? But they met the leaders, and of course, they were absolutely charmed by these people. They're very charming people, very good at relating to people, very good at really looking after people, you know, and there wasn't I I never felt like it was that that I had to hide anything. There wasn't weird, it wasn't weird, it was radical. I think that's the way I would kind of describe it. It was just that little bit more radical than well, not a little bit, but it was just that much more radical expression of your Christian faith. And because this guy was such an academic who wrote all these teaching courses and wrote this massive tome of a book called Man and Woman in Christ, which became almost the new Bible sort of thing, it described all the men's and women's roles, and you were taught about parenting. And oh my god, some of the stuff was was was not great. You know, now we look back at it and think, I mean, thankfully, we left when our youngest was just two. So we did get out before some of those more major kind of parenting things, and we look back at some of our peers who are still in it and their kids and how messed up some of them are. Um, it's really sad, particularly because they're fully anti-homosexuality, anti-trans. Yeah, anything LGBTQ would be completely anti, um, they would be massively pro-life, so very much the far-right Christian type beliefs and all of that. But I we know some of the some kids are completely alienated from their parents because one kid is trans, and we know that the the parents have completely rejected that child and won't talk to their child, you know, which is tragic. Yeah, exactly. It's terrible.

SPEAKER_00 27:52

You know how you reflect sometimes on things that happen to you when you're younger when you're talking to someone, and I remember when I was about 14, there was a girl at my school who was a Mormon, and she invited me to various dances like in the evenings, like like uh they were just discos basically in the 90s, early 90s. Yeah, and um I remember my mum being really worried about it and being like, oh mum, for God's sake, like it's just a disc, and then like, and obviously they'd all been told to bring a friend, haven't they? And then there was this whole premier at the end, and like and and and then I do kind of remember standing there a bit like you you were describing, um thinking, this is a bit strange, but it's kind of nice, and you know, everyone's so nice, and and then going home and mum going, you're not doing that again. And and I went I went once, I went I went once, it was like a Valentine's disco, and then I think I did go to another one and I managed to twist my mum's and mum to let me go, but she was very reluctant. And I think as a parent of teenagers now, I've got a 20-year-old and a nearly 18-year-old, and if my younger one was to go off to university now and come back, I mean from your perspective now, like was there anything that your parents could have done to A, stop you or B what would your advice be to a parent in that scenario now if their child goes off and gets involved with one of these things? Yeah, I mean, how what would you do?

SPEAKER_02 29:26

Yeah, it's a it's it's a really important point because you know I think a lot of parents um worry about stuff like that, you know.

SPEAKER_00 29:34

Yeah, I haven't even thought about it to be honest, in terms of my own children.

SPEAKER_02 29:37

Yeah, my my advice would be you can't stop them doing what they want to do. So, from my perspective, it would be just keeping the lines of communication as open as possible with them. I'd be super curious about what they're doing and what they're being fed, and and just actually, so one of the key things, you know, we've talked about various bits and pieces, love bombing and coercion and control and that sort of stuff. One of the key things cults do is gradually take away your critical thinking, right? And critical thinking is essential. So that that curiosity that always is asking the question, well, what about this? What's the what's the evidence for this? So I would I would just encourage people who think, hmm, my kids got involved in something a bit strange. I would just keep keep asking, keep asking, because the nature of these organizations is they will be feeding them, oh, your parents are gonna say this and that and all the other things, right? So they're super switched on to that. I've known of people say, you know, oh, don't listen to your parents, you know, uh they don't understand what we're doing. You know, we're we're right, we've got the answers, we're right. And if you then start trying to say, oh, don't do this, don't do that, guess what? Kids are bloody well do the opposite, right? Of course they will. So, so it it it is just trying to keep those lines of communications open and encourage them to think critically. You say, Have you thought about this? What's the consequence of that? And feed them some questions to be asking themselves and just say, Have you thought about an alternative to that? Obviously, think about harm. Is anyone doing any harm, particularly? I think is always a red flag, definitely. And I think taking away certain liberties, freedoms is a form of harm, right? That that sort of coercive control. So, so yeah, just asking them, I suppose, have you thought about this? What do you think about that? And actually, I I would say show an interest in it, okay. Rather than just be anti-oh no, that's a pile of rubbish, don't do that, don't do that. The rebellion in the kids will just be like, oh, you don't understand, and they just will stop talking to you about it. So I think having that curious nature yourself as well, say, Oh, that's that's interesting. I'd love to know a bit more about that. Can you tell me? And and just trying to have those open conversations with the child that is potentially getting involved in something, I think is the key is the key thing. That's all.

SPEAKER_00 32:27

Yeah. So you said you obviously your youngest was two when you left. Um, and well, you you were already married by then, were you? Yes, yeah, and because presumably that would have been terrible against the law.

SPEAKER_02 32:41

Yeah, I mean, that even the the whole courtship process is very structured and managed. Yeah, I mean, I had a lot more again, coming back to my certain sense of autonomy, I think is perhaps a good word for for me. So the process was basically A, you first did this discernment piece, should you get married or should you be single, right? Once you were then ready to get married, it was like, okay, are you financially able to do that and support someone, etc., right? And then it was like, okay, so we'd encourage you to make a list of potential partners. You were encouraged to literally, and then you were supposed to invite everyone on that list out for a date. I didn't do this, but I've got one of my mates who's now out of it, literally did three dates in one day. Right? He did a coffee morning date, he did a lunch date, and he did an e uh an evening dinner date, right? With three different women. Now, I I was in this position where again it's a weird thing when I look back at it because about a year after I got involved with the organization, we were at one of these sort of prayer meetings, you know, happy clappy prayer meetings, and I had this really vivid experience where at the time I just I literally there were the wording I would have used at the time was God's told me I'm gonna marry Jess, literally, right? In a prayer meeting, looking across, da-da-da, you know, this holy glow around her. Oh, that's my future wife, right? Love at best stuff, right? Now, neurologically, neurotransmitters, there would have been a shitload of you know, dopamine and oxytocin and all stuff flowing through my body, hormones and all this stuff, yeah. Absolutely. All right, so yeah, it was an experience, how you interpret that, whatever. But this was just a year in, right? So we didn't actually date for another five years. All right. I I always kept a kind of very platonic relationship with Jess because I always felt that's the woman I'm gonna marry, and I even had a couple of girlfriends through that process, but I always kept this very special kind of yeah, friendship with Jess. So when I got to the point of right, I'm not gonna be celibate, I'm gonna be married. My pastoral leader said, Right, oh, you need to think about I said, let me just stop you there. Because I was a man, right? Patriarchy, I had a little bit more. I said, no, I'm not gonna make a list. I'm gonna marry Jess, so I'm gonna ask Jess out. This is what I believe, and um, but then I had to follow the process, right? So to ask Jess out, I told my pastoral leader, my pastoral leader spoke to her pastoral leader, her pastoral leader spoke to her and said, Pete wants to ask you out. So, and then it came back through the chain to me saying, Okay, you can now ask Jess out.

SPEAKER_00 35:49

Did she have any choice in the matter?

SPEAKER_02 35:52

So, my I I kind of I played the game, right? I played the game by the time we went on our first date. Literally, we were already in love, and and it was just a straightforward process. But if you if you were to talk to Jess about it, and and I agree and support her viewpoint, from her viewpoint, it was an arranged marriage, right? Because of the processes. So she was told, Oh, Jess, there's two guys that actually, you know, uh are so I and I was thankfully I was one of them, and she was like, Okay, I'm gonna I'm gonna go out with Pete. Uh, and yeah, and there'd been a couple of those looks, glances, moments, even before the first date, it's like, and Jess would say that, oh my god, I'm completely in love with him, sort of thing. And I'd been in love with her for for several years, you know. So the time literally, so we we had our first date on the 30th of November 1988. We got engaged on the 25th of May, and we got married on the 2nd of December, exactly like a year later, you know. Wow, and that was partly because she was Catholic then, so the Catholic Church insisted pretty much you had to be engaged for six months. Um, so it was like, sod it, we're not waiting a whole year to next summer. So we actually got married in the winter on December 2nd.

SPEAKER_00 37:11

Wow, so you can be Catholic within this.

SPEAKER_02 37:14

So it was uh, yeah, so it was Christian, right? So it was an ecumenical, it was interdenominational. So I was church, uh I was Anglican, all right, but there was Catholic, it was about 50-50 Protestants and Catholics, okay. So actually a Sunday, and what was really weird, it wasn't a church, right? It was a community. So on a Sunday, our day was full. Having done this Lord's Day celebration on the Saturday evening, right? Sunday, we'd go to Jess and I, when we were together originally, we'd go to Mass together, then we go to my church together, then we go to the community meeting in the uh Sunday afternoon. It was just non-stop.

SPEAKER_00 37:53

Yeah, they almost kept you so busy you didn't have time to think about it.

SPEAKER_02 37:56

Exactly. It yeah, it's so interesting.

SPEAKER_00 37:59

Yeah, I'm sure. So once you left and you had to reintegrate yourself into normal life for want of a better word, sure. What did you have to unlearn in that first few years? What what what did that look like for you guys? Because as a family as well, you you weren't just it wasn't just you, you were a unit, weren't you?

SPEAKER_02 38:25

So yeah. So actually, when we left the community, we actually threw ourselves into a local church, again, which was quite a radical, evangelical, happy clappy church, right? I became one of the worship leaders. Jess Jess is a professional musician, so she was on the worship team as well, and we contributed it, etc. So for me, and our journeys are different, all right. So for me, I slowly drifted away from my faith as a Christian, and that was a real gradual process uh in terms of how it I expressed it. But looking back, I think I believed what I believed now much earlier than I let on, but I had to work it through and also just kind of almost get the courage to say, sorry, I'm not a Christian anymore, because I'd been this mega Christian guy, right? Yeah, um, for for ages, and actually, honestly, that caused a lot quite a bit of problem in our marriage because suddenly I was not a Christian and saying I wasn't a Christian, and my wife still was and still quite committed to her faith. Um, and that caused quite a lot of tension in our marriage. Um, you know, eventually we moved out of London away from that. Uh, we left that church behind in West London in 2011. So we left the community in '98, joined this church. We were part of it for about a decade. As I say, I kind of then had pretty much stopped going after about five or six years, I think. Jess kept involved, and then we moved out of London and to the Cotswolds. That was a tough time, it was the right thing to do. We both agree it was the right thing to do. But we we basically went pretty much as soon as we got here, we went into marriage counselling. It was only a maybe I think five sessions we did with a marriage counsellor, but it just enabled us to start a process where we were able to mainly listen to each other, right? Um, without interrupting. It really helped us in our communication, I think at that point, and then gradually got better and better. When we moved to the Cotswolds, Jess got involved in the sister church of the one we'd been in in West London. It was part of a bigger organization called New Wine, and there was a summer festival that we went to, etc. So when we came to Cheltenham, uh, one of the main churches that was part of that organisation was in Cheltenham, and so got involved in that or Jess did. I kind of went along occasionally more for support for myself and for the kids, and again, that was a toxic situation for my wife. The vicar of that church, that blew up. He had an affair with the the person who was in charge of worship. Jess experienced real reluctance, and that we knew why, because you know, the the woman who was in favour was in favour because she was sleeping with the vicar, kind of thing. So more crap, basically. And I think now Jess has a faith of sorts, not necessarily a Christian faith, I'd say. We don't go to church at she doesn't go to church, hasn't gone to church for uh oh gosh, a good five years, probably a bit longer, perhaps. I lose track of time, uh, because it's now 15 years since we've been away from London. So our journeys went at really different paces, and that did cause um a lot of problems. Now, actually, we're super strong together, we've learned really good communication skills, respect for each other, with really different people, uh, you know, with complementary kind of talents and skills, and yeah, so my journey and that whole process into marriage, uh, through marriage, out of marriage, you know, me being the head of the household. I refuse to sit at the head of a uh uh dining table now, as a point of principle, because it's just like that was what was expected. The husband would always sit at the head of the house, and as a point of principle, I never sit at the end of a table, right? Jess was more uh she would say she was spiritually abused, so she's gone through specific therapy for cult survivors, which was really, really helpful for her. And I'd say we we support, you know, a lot of well, Jess particularly sports a lot of women because women were much more adversely affected by a lot of the stuff that went on, and they struggle, so she's really quite active. She's written her memoir, right? Which is we hope one day will be published. She's a beautiful writer. Her first work of fiction comes out in June, actually. She's got a book that's being published, which is very exciting. But her memoir, she's she got fantastic reviews by a whole bunch of publishers. Sadly, no one would publish it because of libel issues.

SPEAKER_01 43:42

Really?

SPEAKER_02 43:43

All right, now some of the key characters are are actually deceased now, and I think if Jess got a little bit of celebrity through her fictional work, which she might, because she is a great writer, she's won prizes for her writing. And stuff.

SPEAKER_00 44:00

The very first conversation we ever had, you and I talked about kind of cult behaviour and we talked a lot about how in real life there are these kind of cult situations that we don't really necessarily know that we're part of. My family are, I would consider as to be a rugby family, because you know, my husband plays, my sons play, my sons have played since they could walk, basically. And if you're being from Wales, you understand the the importance of rugby. But it's so interesting, isn't it? How these we we're all we all want to belong to something, yeah. Right. We all enjoy, like you said, you still believe in community. And the rugby club, I I love it. It is a community. You can turn up at any time of day there. There's always someone to welcome you with a smile on their face. You know, it can be quite clicky. There are definitely the hierarchies, the chairmen, the you know, the all the stuff that goes with it. And I just find that aspect of it fascinating is that potentially we're all involved in, you know, whether it's I made a list, I think, when we spoke last time, the army, elite sports, rugby clubs, churches, whatever it is, football clubs, team sports, anything like that, where you become part of this thing. And it's interesting to me to think about at what point it becomes toxic, at what point it becomes something else. So, what do you what's your take on that? Because presumably you've reflected on that since.

SPEAKER_02 45:40

Oh, it's it's a huge part of the work that I'm doing actually in my PhD. Cults are everywhere, right? Cults are everywhere. So that could be in in a yoga place, it could be in um mixed martial arts, okay, it could be in multi-level marketing campaigns, you know, these pyramid schemes, it can be in organizations, it can be in charities, it can be uh my my view is anywhere where there's a leader of a team that could just be a leader with just a few people of two or three people, has potential to be cult-like, right? If that leader starts behaving in a way that is controlling, coercive, etc. Okay. So a lot of people have studied cults, and interestingly, there's quite a lot on on the telly at the moment about stuff. There's the Louis Thoreau about the manosphere, right? That uh, I mean, scary as anything, right? Yeah, um, what's going on? You know, there's the Trump, there's the cult of Trump in America for sure, right? There's there's it's everywhere. So, because of my lived experience, right, in history, so I am I'm doing a PhD at the moment, and actually what I'm looking at is um, and I've got I've got a vision to do a TED talk that's called Cult in Corporate Culture, which just yeah, has a nice alliterative ring to it, doesn't it? But but what what I'm looking at, so I've developed a uh a tool called the Workplace Culture Index, which is a series of 30 questions. It's a bit like a psychometric test, but essentially it's specifically targeted to assess the culture of your workplace, current or in the past, and you answer these questions based on a either your current workplace experience or you can reflect back on a I I've invited through LinkedIn, I've invited people to complete this questionnaire. And originally, because I'm looking at the toxic end, I said, has anyone either left a job because of a really bad leader or just because of a horrible workplace situation? If you have, right? If you have, please complete my form. I can send you the link, right? Um, and it generates a score. Okay, so each question is graded from zero to four, 30 questions. So there's a maximum score of 120, minimum score of zero, and you answer these 30 questions. I see all of that and put it into my table, blah blah blah, and it chucks out a score. But at the end, there's a 31st question which asks people just overall, please give me a subjective rating of your experience. Was it horrible, pretty bad, average, pretty good, or great? Now, what's happened is I've now started inviting people who've enjoyed their workplace experience, right, and had a great thing, and I'm starting to get some stats, and they're absolutely fascinating. So, what initially it showed is that horrible and pretty bad score low, right? But average, pretty good, and great don't score that much better. And in fact, on the average, I just did this a little analysis uh last in the last couple of days. The average score for pretty good actually has the highest score. The average score for great is actually less, right? Now I need more numbers, and what what my current hypothesis is is that and this kind of feeds into why people get involved with cults, right? Is because even if they think it was great, when you look at specific behaviors, which is what I'm trying to break out in my 30 questions, there's still some pretty bad behaviors, but those bad behaviors have become normalized. So people think, oh, this is a nice place to work, and they've rated it great, but their score is only still somewhere in the middle of about 60 out of 120. So I'm finding that fascinating as part of my research, right? Um, and and I think we'll we'll see how it develops. But so what I do in my work, I I'm passionate about doing what I can to improve how leaders behave, right? I want great leadership so that it generates great workplace culture. I often say, imagine a world where you went to work to actually relieve your stress, not to get stressed. That actually your life outside work was more stressful than it was in work. Now, actually, you'd want everything to be equal, of course, but imagine a world where people aren't getting burnt out, aren't getting stressed, aren't getting depressed, aren't being abused, aren't being treated badly, etc. etc. Right? So that's kind of my passion. So, yeah, these things exist everywhere. It only takes one person with a little bit of responsibility, and that power, right? That control can go to their head, and they start bad behaviors, little things like how they speak to people, how they listen to people, right? Micromanaging, a whole bunch of qualities and behaviors. Classic one is where do decisions get made? Is it in the meeting, or is it in the meeting after the meeting by the leader's little clique, right? You talk about clicks, right? So these are the things I'm trying to tease out, and there are classic behaviors of cult. So there's lots of research on that, and it'll say there's lists of like these are the seven, eight, or nine qualities of a classic cult, and it's charismatic leadership, it's love bombing, it's coercion control, it's filling up your time, it's giving you all the answers, it's all of these sorts of things. So you can look at that and overall make a judgment, but of course, there's spectrums, right? From amazing to horribly toxic. But generally, what we want to do is move things in the good direction.

SPEAKER_00 51:56

Yeah, definitely. So, what do you think is the biggest myth that people have about leadership, about what leadership is?

SPEAKER_02 52:06

Leadership is is not about power, basically. Leading for me is primarily about how you behave. I I think there's a whole bunch of stuff. It's around uh values. Are you clear on your values? Um, how do you pay attention? How do you recognize other people's work? Are you able to give people autonomy? Do you appreciate people? Are you accepting rather than non-judgmental? I mean, it's funny you should ask. So I've I did a separate piece of work a few years ago. It's called the leadership A-List. I can share it with you if you're interested. It's basically 10 behavioral qualities. They all start with A, hence it's the A-list, all right. But it's around authenticity, alignment, appreciation, acceptance, autonomy, those sorts of things, right? And I think they're 10 characteristics that make a great leader. There's no one thing, right? It's not about power, it's not about control, etc. Leadership. There's lots of different types of leadership, and the other thing to say is it's highly contextual, right? So in an emergency, you you need very clear, dominant, instructive leadership, right? The house is on fire, everybody out, go there, do this. It's really direct, right? Um, and that's a specific context, right? But if you're trying to build a team, right, that's a totally different thing. It's it's actually a lot of the people skills of being able to listen, being able to ask questions, being curious, right, valuing diversity, understanding the value of diversity and all that sort of stuff, and bringing all that stuff together is what makes the high-performing team. There's a lot about AI at the moment, right? Huge, and a lot of people are worried about AI and what stats can do. AI is brilliant at doing tasks, right? But it's not brilliant at relationships, it's crap. And so, for me, when I'm talking to people and businesses or any sort of organization, for me, the place to go in terms of combating and this world of AI, and it's not when AI comes, AI is here, right? It's really doubling down on human connection for me. It's it's it's being human and understanding who you are as human beings, right? Um, and tapping into things like emotional intelligence, particularly, I think is absolutely essential for all of us. Figure out how we think. I often talk about head, heart, guts. Don't just rely on your cognition and your logic. Listen to your heart, listen to your guts. Think about those things. What's your body telling you in any one moment, and how are you responding to that personally? How is that affecting you personally? And then think about what the heck's going on for everyone I'm actually relating to, right? That's where the power of progress as the human race is.

SPEAKER_00 55:10

I find that fascinating because you see, I talk about when I'm coaching or when I'm doing my mojo work, I talk about mind, body, and soul and connecting the three and feeling aligned and all the rest of it. When I'm teaching, dancing, I talk about brain, body, and breath. It's the same thing you talk about essentially, we're talking about the same thing, and and actually think in terms of AI, nothing can beat a physical exchange of energy. Now, whether that is with a faith, with a spirituality, whether it's just to do with actual exchanges of hormones, pheromones, dopamine, all that just, you know, well, whatever it is, you can't replicate that with a machine. And so I find it fascinating that we we ultimately fall back to that. You you need those water cooler moments, you need those exchanges of energy, the smile, the eye contact, whatever it is. You know, it's so in terms of your research, then, so on a different end of the spectrum, yeah, what is the most underrated indicator that a team is is struggling, falling apart? What what what should a leader look for in his team? What do people fail to see?

SPEAKER_02 56:30

So I I think it's that whole, it's exactly what you were just talking about, right? It's all of those human indicators, it's not how they're doing their tasks, right? It's engagement. Is there light in their eyes? Look at people, smile at people, and see what response you get back. Thank someone, show some appreciation, and see how they respond. Okay, and how they respond will tell you so much to any comment, whether it's a bit of feedback, whether it's a bit of appreciation, even if it's just a greeting saying, Hey, how are you doing? I think tapping into that human connection is so underrated. We're so focused on KPIs, right? Yeah, have you hit your sales target? What's your profitability? What's your turnover? All these numbers, they have their place, they have their place for sure, but I think just looking at people, engaging with people, and checking in with people, it is essential. It's do those people belong, do they belong in that organization? Do they feel like they belong, or are they constantly trying to fit in? And there's such a difference, and they might not feel they fit in, but they're doing their darndest to fit in, and leaders are so uh ignorant of that sort of dynamic. They're like, oh yeah, they're fine, they watch what they do, right? But they don't necessarily watch how they do what they do, and it's the how that's the key for me. It you might you might be the best salesperson in the world, your numbers might be incredible. But actually, what's the trail of destruction behind that person to generate those great KPI sales figures? And the clues are always there, they're always there if you look for them, and I think that's where leaders they're so busy, they're they got pressure from above to deliver on whatever their projects are that they then they just miss those human indicators, right? So the first thing that they got to do is tap into themselves. That self-awareness, it's like, okay, what's going on for me? How am I doing? Because how you are as a leader actually is infectious. You talk about energy, whatever you believe, and your energy will impact other people. A smile will impact people, a kind word will impact people rather than just getting straight into business. How are your sales numbers? How's how's this going? You're late, you know, what whatever it is, just taking that moment because by doing that, you make the other people feel better, and guess what? Their productivity becomes much better because they feel better. So you gotta start with yourself, right? It's the classic four steps of emotional intelligence: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, social management. That's how I talk it through. It's really simple, but so many people miss that self-awareness and self-management step. They think emotional intelligence is being able to read the room. What they completely miss is their ability to read themselves in a situation, right? It's like have some self-awareness, you know.

SPEAKER_00 59:51

Yeah, it's amazing how many people don't have any. Um so we've got to wrap up shortly, I know, because we've got to head off. But is there any old habits, patterns that you occasionally catch yourself and you have to just oh my god, so many. Really, really, we'd be here for hours.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:11

I I think probably the hardest one for me is is just catching my my judgment, actually. It's so so easy to make a judgment on a person, an action, a situation. And I have this phrase, the assumption of positive intent that some people use. It's basically just trying to think the best of people and not getting frustrated when I just suddenly see something, and I'm constantly working on myself, saying, Well, hang on a minute. Our emotional brain kicks up half a second before our cognitive brain kicks in. Yeah, that primitive emotion kicks in, and it's so powerful, it's so powerful. So just taking a breath, slowing things down, and thinking, okay, no, hang on a minute, just rethink that. So, yeah, I think that's perhaps my biggest one is personally, I was raised in a family that was constantly felt we were doing the you know, it was always this is how we do it in this family, it's very logic-oriented, very, very logical orientated, and that's the right way. And then I joined a cult that reinforced this is the right way, sort of thing. So, yeah, there's lots of ways to do things, and none of them are right, none of them are wrong, they're just all different. And actually, accepting that it one way might be right for me, but if someone else is doing exactly the same task, it they might have a different way to do it, which is equally right for them, and and getting my head out of that space that's no, no, no, it's my way or the highway sort of mentality.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:54

It's just a different truth, it's someone else's truth.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:56

Absolutely, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:57

Lovely. So, if anybody has listened to this and is obviously affected by anything they've heard or want to get in touch with you or work with you, where can we find you?

SPEAKER_02 1:02:07

Yeah, please, I'd love to hear from people. You don't even have to want to work with me if you're just curious to connect. I love connecting with people. So, um, best place two places, very simply. I think I'm the only Peter Greedy on LinkedIn, so that's an easy place to find me. Just type Peter Greedy into LinkedIn, or just come via my website, petergreedy.com. So very straightforward, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:29

Lovely. And and just so if you could leave the listeners with any one thought of just about belonging and trust and having the courage to step out of something that doesn't feel right for you, what would you say?

SPEAKER_02 1:02:47

I I would say listen to yourself and get curious with yourself. Is it sitting right with you? Are you peaceful? Does it align with your values? It's just that, you know, what what are you hearing from yourself? Is it is it right or is it wrong? And and but don't be afraid to trust yourself and how you feel about the situation.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:13

Amazing, Peter. Thank you so much for your time today.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:16

My pleasure.